I forwarded part of this to Ben so Kapil can hopefully get an answer to his dispatcher question ASAP.
As far as the extractor and other tools go ...
Some of the package summary stuff Kapil discusses is handled by the APM, though awkwardly (i.e. you have
to visit the package to see the summary information).
It would be nice to have more summary information for installed modules as a whole within the APM itself, rather than as a standalone tool.
In addition, one thing I've been thinking would be useful would be a dependency tool
that orders the modules according to where they slot into the
dependency hierarchy.
This ordered list would then tell us what order we need to port
modules in.
The system's simple enough so that we can figure this out by hand
quickly enough but writing the queries to generate the list
automatically would be easy...any takers?
In regard to nsxml versions this vs that, at the moment we're using THREE XML parsers in OpenACS - the
Tcl-based one used by the APM, the Oracle Java-based XML parser
used by CMS, and now nsxml used by the query dispatcher.
By release time that needs to be cut down to *one* XML parser.
Ben wrote nsxml (though not libxml of course) and I imagine he knows
that if we're going to use it, he's going to maintain it :)
I don't really care which parser we use but personally find the
notion of employing three of them unacceptable.
